Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 21, 2018

Throughout my life, politics and political science have been intertwined. I handed out leaflets for Adlai Stevenson at age 12, participated in protests at Oberlin and Berkeley, and, as I developed professional expertise, worked with national security agencies. Conflict has been a continuing interest, particularly whether situations are best analyzed as a security dilemma or aggression. In exploring this question, I was drawn into both political psychology and signaling, although the two are very different. I have continued to work on each and occasionally try to bring them together. My thinking about strategic interaction led to a book-length exploration of system effects, a way of thinking that I believe is still insufficiently appreciated in the discipline and among policy makers. My research continues to be stimulated by both developments in the discipline and unfolding international politics.

Charles V. Hamilton is the Wallace Sayre Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Government at Columbia University. He is the author of several important books on the study of race and politics, focusing primarily on the African-American experience. He is the coauthor of Black Power: A Politics of Liberation with the late Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), as well as The Black Preacher in America; Bench and the Ballot: Southern Federal Judges and Black Voters; Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma; and coauthor with Dona Cooper Hamilton of The Dual Agenda: Race and the Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations. He was interviewed by Fredrick C. Harris, Dean of Social Science and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, on July 13, 2017, at the University of Chicago. This is an edited transcript; a video of the entire interview can be viewed below or at http://www.annualreviews.org/r/charlesvhamilton.

Political scientists use diverse methods to study important topics. The findings they reach and conclusions they draw can have significant social implications and are sometimes controversial. As a result, audiences can be skeptical about the rigor and relevance of the knowledge claims that political scientists produce. For these reasons, being a political scientist means facing myriad questions about how we know what we claim to know. Transparency can help political scientists address these questions. An emerging literature and set of practices suggest that sharing more data and providing more information about our analytic and interpretive choices can help others understand the rigor and relevance of our claims. At the same time, increasing transparency can be costly and has been contentious. This review describes opportunities created by, and difficulties posed by, attempts to increase transparency. We conclude that, despite the challenges, consensus about the value and practice of transparency is emerging within and across political science's diverse and dynamic research communities.

This article reviews recent survey-based research on citizens’ trust in government, focusing particularly on the United States. It addresses the long-term decline in trust and potential causes for this decline, with an emphasis on the effects of partisanship, polarization, performance, process, and media priming. While dispositions can anchor trust levels, the dominant research findings show that the sources of variation and change in trust are political, if multifaceted, in nature. We discuss new versions of standard measures, call for a renewed look at the distinction between trust in authorities and trust in the regime, review ongoing work on how and why trust matters, and recommend broadening the foci of mistrust to include antiestablishment sentiments and attacks on electoral integrity. How trust intervenes between perceptions of political processes and compliance with authoritative commands is a critical domain for additional research. We conclude with a caveat against confidence that the decline in trust can be quickly or easily reversed.

What state capacity is and how to strengthen it remain open questions, as the underlying incentives of the state, its citizens, and its agents align in some areas of state activity and diverge in others. This article lays out a framework that integrates classical and experimental approaches within a common theoretical structure based on the diverse capacity challenges states face with respect to extraction, coordination, and compliance. Addressing each in turn, we show that state capacity is an interactive process, the product of institutions governing relations between the state, mass publics, and bureaucrats. We argue that the institutions ensuring capacity and the processes that bring them into being vary. Our review highlights trends in recent research, as well as relevant differences in opportunities for and obstacles to empirical work on the subject.

Scholars have paid increasing attention to democratic backsliding, yet efforts to explain this phenomenon remain inchoate. This article seeks to place the study of democratic backsliding on sturdier conceptual, operational, and theoretical foundations. Conceptually, the challenge of backsliding is to define changes that take place within a political regime. Methodologically, the challenge involves measurement of intraregime changes, as alternative coding schemes change the population of units that have experienced democratic backsliding. Theoretical challenges are dual: First, despite a rich and diverse literature, we lack readily available theories to explain backsliding, and second, the theoretical debates that do exist—centered on the causes of democratic transitions, democratic breakdowns, authoritarian resilience, and democratic consolidation—remain unresolved. We consider how these theories might be called into service to explain backsliding. By doing so, the article aims to set the terms of the debate to create a common focal point around which research can coalesce.

The last 20 years have witnessed an impressive outpouring of comparative politics research examining urban politics in the developing world. This research advances our understanding of phenomena such as clientelism, law and order, and local public goods provision. Scholarship could be strengthened, however, through more careful attention to how the urban setting of this research affects the politics examined. This article proposes two distinct ways in which urban politics can be conceptualized: politics taking place in urban agglomerations, characterized by large, diverse populations settled at high densities; or politics taking place within the boundaries of city jurisdictions, possessing legal powers and responsibilities distinct from those at other tiers of government or in rural areas. Adopting either of these conceptualizations illuminates new avenues for empirical work, theoretical innovation, and improved measurement. This article also shows that recent scholarship has neglected important, and fundamentally political, topics such as urban political economy, land markets, and environmental harms. Engaging with these areas would allow political scientists to revisit classic questions regarding the institutional influences on economic growth, the politics of redistribution, and the determinants of collective action.

Observers of elections often report that voters have engaged in protest voting. We find that “protest voting” refers to a wide range of behaviors, and we create a taxonomy of these phenomena. Support for fringe or insurgent parties is often labeled as protest voting. Voting theorists have used the term in a completely different way, identifying an unusual type of tactical voting as protest voting. Protest voting also occurs when voters cast blank, null, or spoiled ballots. There are also instances when protest voting is organized and directed by political elites. Finally, several countries provide voters with the option of casting a vote for “None of the Above,” which some see as a form of protest voting. In addition to developing this taxonomy, we discuss the analytical and empirical challenges confronting research on each type of protest voting.

This article discusses what traditional Confucian political theory represents and how it is reconstructed by contemporary Confucians to cope with the various challenges that it faces in modern times. Specifically, I examine the school of New Confucianism in Taiwan and Hong Kong, political Confucianism and civic Confucianism in mainland China, and the theory of Confucian political meritocracy. I then analyze how the Communist Party of China attempts to promote Confucianism in order to consolidate its authoritarian rule and what damage this may cause to resurgent Confucianism. Finally, I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and suggest some areas of interest for further exploration.

The theory of parties put forward by scholars associated with the University of California at Los Angeles argues that political parties are best viewed as coalitions of intense policy demanders. These policy demanders use their control of nomination processes to select candidates loyal to the groups’ shared policy priorities. By highlighting the role of groups, this theory has made a major contribution to our understanding of party politics, breathing new life into important debates about the limitations of democratic responsiveness in the United States. The theory, however, leaves a number of theoretical and empirical issues unresolved. The “invisible primary” hypothesis has performed poorly in recent presidential elections. More importantly, we argue that the next generation of party theorizing needs to account for the distinctive roles and capacities of officeholders and voters, and to reengage the idea of formal parties as institutional intermediaries between groups, politicians, and voters.

Political scientists are fielding more and more surveys in the developing world. Yet, most survey research methodology derives from experiences in developed countries. Researchers working in the developing world often confront very different challenges to collecting high-quality data. Census data may be unreliable or outdated, enumerators may shirk, political topics may be sensitive, and respondents may be unaccustomed to and uncomfortable with an interview format. In this article, we review both published methodological research and the best practices of scholars based on an original expert survey of survey researchers. We characterize the state of the field and provide insights about the range of available options for implementing surveys in the developing world. We examine and assess innovations across many aspects of survey implementation, including sampling, enumeration, data collection, ethical considerations, and reporting. We also offer suggestions for future methodological inquiry and for greater research transparency.

This article seeks to explain why some high-capacity democracies have high levels of internal violence. These regimes present a puzzle: Why are bureaucratically capable states that ostensibly answer to voters failing to provide security? Challenging the “weak states” paradigm, we argue that states with high capacity and significant violence within marginalized populations exhibit a governance pattern in which governing factions deliberately weaken security services and collude with nonstate violent actors to maintain power and ensure extreme levels of privilege and impunity. Although these states do not feature ideal-type institutions, they are not weak. Instead, economic and political elites are complicit in enforcing a system of material inequality and uneven democratic incorporation maintained by violence. As politicized security agencies become incapacitated and repressive, citizens turn to nonstate security providers for protection, from private firms to criminals and insurgents, increasing social violence and obscuring the state origins of what we term privilege violence.

What does it mean to identify with a social group? Are individuals’ group attachments tied to material or nonmaterial payoffs? What is the existing evidence for social identification due to nonmaterial payoffs? When do identities matter and for what sorts of behaviors? We highlight findings from several literatures in political science, ranging from voting and redistribution to violence and conflict, focusing on nonmaterial, identity-based motivations for behavior in these domains. Doing so allows us to draw out commonalities across research areas that are often held in isolation from one another and that frequently employ overlapping terminology. We summarize important findings and identify open questions; these questions include what the role played by elites is in shaping mass mobilization around identities and what the relationship is between social identities and social norms.

This article calls attention to some designs in survey experiments that give new leverage in hypothesis testing and validation. The premise of this review is the modesty of survey experiments—modesty of treatment, modesty of scale, modesty of measurement. The focus of this review, accordingly, is the compensating virtues of modesty. With respect to hypothesis testing, I spotlight (a) cross-category comparisons, (b) null-by-design experiments, (c) explication, (d) conjoint designs, and (e) sequential factorials. With respect to validation regimes, I discuss (a) parallel studies, (b) paired designs, and (c) splicing. Throughout, the emphasis is on moving from experiment in the singular to experiments in the plural, learning as you go.

The fiscal sociology literature views the state at the heart of development, but in most developing countries, formal taxation is limited. Instead, local residents make substantial contributions outside the state to the provision of public goods. That is, they engage in what we call social extraction rather than state taxation. This article conceptualizes social extraction and the social institutions that drive extraction. Furthermore, it considers variations in the content of social institutions, and it proposes research agendas that allow us to understand how social institutions impact resource mobilization and development at the community level. It draws lessons from a large, cross-disciplinary literature that includes work in anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, and political science.

Most work on redistribution in democracies is anchored in long-standing unidimensional models, notably the seminal Meltzer-Richard-Romer model. When scholars venture outside the security of unidimensionality, many either abandon theoretical rigor or miss the full consequences of adding more dimensions (whether ideological or economic). There is now a substantial literature on redistributive politics in multidimensional policy spaces, but it tends to be very technical and frequently misinterpreted, if not ignored. This purpose of this article is to review this relatively new literature using simple graphical representations, focusing on the key assumptions, intuitions, and results. We show how issue bundling, issue salience, and the distribution of preferences can affect redistribution, and we discuss the role of political institutions in inducing particular outcomes. We also highlight the opportunities for dialogue between formal models and more constructivist approaches by exploring the effects of political entrepreneurs manipulating salience, institutions, and even identities.

Political psychology in international relations (IR) has undergone a dramatic transformation in the past two decades, mirroring the broader changes occurring in IR itself. This review examines the current state of the field. We begin by offering a data-driven snapshot analyzing four years of manuscript classifications at a major IR journal to characterize the questions that IR scholars engaged in psychological research are and are not investigating. We then emphasize six developments in particular, both present-day growth areas (an increased interest in emotions and hot cognition, the rise of more psychologically informed work on public opinion, a nascent research tradition we call the first image reversed, and the rise of neurobiological and evolutionary approaches) and calls for additional scholarship (better integration of the study of mass and elite political behavior and more psychological work in international political economy). Together, these developments constitute some of the directions in which we see the next generation of scholarship heading.

Is the traditional logic by which violent conflict fosters long-run political development universal? To help address this question, this article compares Europe with China. While historical warfare was very common across both units, representative government flourished only in Europe. We suggest that the relationship between violent conflict and political development depends on the underlying political geography context. In Europe, political fragmentation was rampant. Thus, conflict tended to be external (i.e., interstate), and attack threats were multidirectional. Furthermore, exit ability was high in this context. Elites were therefore in a strong bargaining position to demand political representation in return for new tax revenue. China, by contrast, was politically centralized. Here, conflict tended to be internal, attack threats were unidirectional, and exit ability was low. The emperor was thus powerful enough to extract tax funds without surrendering political control. In this context, violent conflict promoted autocratic re-entrenchment. We conclude by briefly analyzing the relationships between political geography, historical conflict, and political development in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Does foreign aid build peace? The answer is of paramount importance for policy makers and practitioners, given that the world's poor are growing increasingly concentrated in conflict-affected countries. Scholars have also demonstrated keen interest, primarily examining the relationship between foreign aid and civil wars. This review takes stock of the existing literature through a survey of key theoretical arguments connecting aid to the onset, dynamics, and recurrence of civil wars. It then articulates a key challenge posed by undertheorization of aid allocation, which is largely nonrandom, making the causal effects difficult to infer. I identify five areas in need of greater attention: microfoundational theoretical assumptions about aid flows; aid in the context of other foreign policy options; explicit articulation of other factors that may mediate or moderate aid's effects; levels of observation and aggregation; and measurement.

The topic of migration raises important and challenging normative questions about the legitimacy of state power, the boundaries of political membership, and justice within and across state borders. States exercise power over borders, but what, if anything, justifies this power? Is it morally permissible for liberal democratic states to prevent their citizens from exiting the country and exclude prospective migrants from entering? If liberal democratic states are justified in excluding some and accepting others, how should they decide whom to admit? This review examines how contemporary political theorists and philosophers have answered these questions. First, I examine the conventional view that says states have the right to control immigration; second, I discuss arguments for open borders. The third section examines critique of open borders, and the fourth section considers more recent arguments that have been advanced in favor of the conventional view. I conclude with some suggestions for future research.